not if the drive's serial number no longer matches. plus the original xbox (don't know about the 360) used a little used feature of the ide spec involving a HDD password that was encoded into the bios - drive ignores any read/writes until someone transmits the correct code, making it somewhat difficult to dupe the drive

As has been said above (and will probably be said below in various forms) - it cuts both ways. To rephrase that in line with your (mildly inflammatory) tone:

Unfortunately, it is awkward since its fairly hard to be a seriously large company these days without operating in both the states and in europe (q.f. the problems one company (I forget who) had when the Sarbanes-Oxley stuff came in, which contradicted French law, making it (at the time) technically impossible to continue).

Top tip: don't shave it off, then its already there when you need it!

Eh? more like under a minute actually. (couldn't see any particular speed figures, but assuming mars earth distance is ~5.5x10^10m, and assuming perfectly linear accel / deccel (which in space ain't that wrong I guess), you get a deltav of ~1.7x10^3ms^-2, now given his trip was only under 1.3x10^6m, using good old a level mechanics that gives you a time of just under 40s...*

*of course, this assumes vast amounts of stuff, including no air resistance and instant change from accel to deccel, but hey.

Apart from that ruddy blue shell. A couple of games with friends and that was enough to put me off playing it again. I mean, fine give better weapons / bonuses to the players at the back, but regularly simply bomb the guy in the lead with no recourse whatsoever? Meh.

Which makes a lifetime (to date) attach rate of what, just over 4? That is not that much, really.

Problem with using netbooks, its the clamshell. Its just awkward to open up and hold up in the places you would pull out a reader / phone.

Now a tablet form-factor netbook would be another story.

I'm not seeing the ambiguity in 'offline' - offline means exactly that, the system is not online (either its turned off or disconnected from the network).

And its real goal is not to protect against such errors (that is what the historical part of a backup like the incremental rsync you described is for). What it is for is protection against a hacker getting into your system and remotely erasing your backups along with your main system (q.f. the recent story re that site of flight sim stuff). Simply saying 'but the target box only exposes ssh/rsync' isn't good enough. All you need is one vulnerability and bang.

You could possibly make an argument in favour of a box which exposes no remote services at all and initiates the rsync itself to a partition explicitly mounted noexec, nosuid; but it is important to realise that that is simply managing the risk down (to ruddy near zero) rather than removing it.

Now for a home setup, its probably the most arguable of all the elements of a backup as to whether you need it. As with all these things, your level of paranoia determines this - I use something similar to what is described above. Yes, I am vulnerable to that type of attack potentially, but that a risk I have judged and made a call on. To think that approach is not at risk is dangerous.

Except (at least presently), apple are not allowing micro-transactions for free apps.

well, in favour of it, most of the others are based around 'score at archiving'. On the other hand, the title of the acheivement could be read to imply that those who have posted here simply to obtain the achievement have, indeed, been fooled.

Unless the comment in the faq implying that it will still be around is, in fact, part of the joke. Which is entirely possible in fact.

Wrong. There are multiple producers here. You are looking at the wrong market - the market here is computer games, not a specific game. If 'half-life X' is too pricey (say), then people will go buy another fps instead.